The present invention relates to data processing, and more particularly, to sharing data.
An important factor in the success of businesses in the current era is the ability to flexibly react to the requirements of the market. Shorter product cycles require decreased product development times and quicker introduction to market, while increased customer demand for individual solutions increases the number of variants.
These factors require businesses to be able to proceed simultaneously with the definition of the product requirements and its structure as well as the introduction of collaborative processes during communication with subcontractors and development partners. New products must be introduced rapidly to market based on internally and externally defined requirements. In order to do this, different approaches must be considered, and input can be provided by different groups of people. Thus, the data used in the collaborative processes has to be monitored for consistency.
For example, one process that requires collaboration is the integration of engineering partners into product development. Different groups of people can change the available data while working on their part of the project. This can lead to logical corruption of data, where two different copies of the same data are edited simultaneously, or changes made to related data no longer match. This logical corruption can render the data unreliable.